Anti-abortion bills stack up in Austin as groups press Gov. Abbott to lead charge

AUSTIN — Although lawmakers scrambled to file bills before last week’s bill-filing deadline taking aim at abortion, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said little about an anti-abortion agenda this year, raising questions about whether he and other leading Republicans are willing to expend political capital on the hot-button social issue in the legislative session.

Still, state lawmakers had filed more than 50 bills pertaining to abortion by last Friday’s bill-filing deadline. Many of them include new restrictions that would likely invite legal challenges, such as proposals to outlaw abortion entirely. Another proposal bans abortions once a heartbeat is detected, which happens around six weeks of gestation, before many women know they are pregnant. Others would make it illegal to abort a fetus with an abnormality after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“The Texas Legislature cannot and will not remain silent,” said Republican Rep. Jeff Leach, of Plano, as he introduced a bill last week that he said “would ensure that Texas does remain in the fight for life.” His proposal, House Bill 16, would open doctors to civil penalty if they fail to try to save the life of a baby that survived an abortion. Such scenarios are rare, according to FactCheck.org, a project out of Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

The governor’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about about the anti-abortion bills, and which he might favor. In recent weeks, Abbott received a 70,000-signature petition from an anti-abortion group pressing him on the issue.

Some abortion rights advocates say Democratic gains in the 2018 election — that unseated a dozen Republicans in the Texas House and resulted in closer-than-expected margins for statewide-elected Republicans — lead them to believe GOP leaders will think twice before passing some anti-abortion bills.

“I think that Republicans across the state have had a wake-up call, and that wake-up call is due in significant part to grassroots efforts and women … who have had enough and who demonstrated that they were going to exercise their power at the ballot box,” said Wendy Davis, a former state senator best known for a 13-hour filibuster in 2013 that temporarily blocked a bill imposing abortion regulations that were later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. “I want them to understand they have to answer to the concerns of women.”

Other advocates warn that Texas women are “under attack yet again” as lawmakers consider more than a dozen anti-abortion bills in the next three months.

“We've seen this type of extremist legislation before and we're prepared to fight for the health and rights of Texas women, no matter what,” said Dyana Limon-Mercado, deputy director of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes.

Advocates for access to abortion are pushing nearly 30 bills they say will prioritize women and protect their reproductive rights. They include expanding access to birth control and sex education and writing protections for abortion into state statute.

Anti-abortion groups press Abbott

Lawmakers began this year’s legislative session vowing to focus on school funding, paying teachers more and easing property tax burdens. However, socially conservative lawmakers have consistently said they want to push a pro-life agenda this year.

It’s unclear how successful that agenda will be. Although the so-called “heartbeat bill,” House Bill 1500, has 60 sponsors, it was assigned to the Public Health Committee which is chaired by a Democrat who wields control over which bills receive a vote to advance out of committee. The office of Rep Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, who chairs the committee, did not respond to a request for comment.

Texas is “a national leader in defending innocent life,” Abbott proclaimed at an anti-abortion rally he headlined in 2018. But in January, he was absent from the same group’s rally on the Capitol steps as thousands of people rallied to ban abortion in 2019.

While Abbott, a Catholic, is an abortion opponent, his relative silence on what lawmakers should do to advance that cause this year is frustrating some who want abortion outlawed.

The group Abolish Abortion Texas flooded the governor’s office with some 70,000 petitions from people across the country urging Abbott to “keep your promise” and make banning abortion a priority this year.

They point to a conversation Abbott had last June when he promised a dying teen he would work to outlaw abortion this year. Sixteen-year-old Jeremiah Thomas, a former football star-turned youth pastor dying from cancer, said his last wish was for Abbott to ban abortion in Texas.

In a video recording viewed more than 300,000 times on Facebook, the governor spoke on the phone with Thomas, saying the issue was already one the Republican Party supported at its annual convention and that abolishing abortion would be an issue he’d push in 2019.

“One of the multitude of things that happens at that convention is the party creates a platform of policy positions and your wish is on the Republican Party platform positions and it’s what we’re going to be pursuing this next legislative session, and that is to outlaw abortion all together in the state of Texas. And so your wish is granted,” Abbott said.

The teen died in August.

Months later, he made no mention the pregnancy-ending procedure in his February State of the State address. He has made only scant reference to his pro-life perspective on his social media accounts.

Bradley Pierce, of Abolish Abortion Texas, did not respond to a request for comment, but in a call to action.

He expressed disappointment in Abbott for failing to lead an anti-abortion agenda this year, “like just wearing the pro-life label should be good enough to satisfy people like you and me.”

Andrea Zelinski is a state bureau reporter focusing on education, politics, social issues and the courts. She previously covered the Tennessee legislature and local education for the Nashville Scene where she was news editor. She also wrote for the Nashville Post, the now defunct Nashville City Paper and TNReport news service, covered the Illinois statehouse and reported for the Associated Press and Small Newspaper Group. A Chicago-area native, she has a master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting from the University of Illinois at Springfield and earned her undergraduate degree at Northeastern Illinois University.